In depth and mini reviews of movies with a sprinkling of nostalgia and film music musings.

Friday, November 28, 2014

Top Ten - Strangest Movies Watched on Mystery Science Theater 3000

So according to the theme
song for Mystery Science Theater 3000
the mad scientists subject Joel or Mike to “cheesy movies, the worst we can
find. La la la.” Now, you could make a fair argument that some of the movies
featured on the show aren’t even that bad. Cheesy I’ll give you, but not the
worst.

But one of the reasons I
love the show so much is that it exposed me to a whole world of weird, off the
wall and just plain “the hell?” movies that I’d never heard of. Some of them
may be sparks of genius that we will never understand, and others must have
been created by a fevered brain boiling with ideas inspired by the beings from
another dimension… or drugs. It could always be drugs.

In any case, I picked my top
ten strangest movies featured on Mystery
Science Theater 3000. I selected one film per season, but I’ll also mention
a few runners up (because some seasons were rich in weirdness). Watch any of
the following at the risk of your own sanity, or at least the loss of a few
brain cells. Ready? Let’s go!

Season One: Robot Monster

In a post-apocalyptic future
a bizarre alien torments a young boy and his family. He is called Ro-man, short
for Robot Man. Thing is, he doesn’t look like a robot, at all! He uses a bubble
maker to create a shield of bubbles. He wanders around a wasteland and kills a
couple people. It doesn’t sound too strange, right?

Ro-man the alien
is a gorilla suit with a deep-sea diving helmet. Wasn’t that a ghost on Scooby
Doo?

Ro-man has some
very odd meandering speeches about the Hu-man

The bubble
machine gets a mention in the credits – because it is thatcool!

Season Two:The Ring of
Terror

This odd little film starts
with a funeral director looking for his cat named Puma. Eventually he tells us
a story about a group of medical students, and how a hazing goes wrong. Someone
dies. There is a ring, but I have yet to experience any terror.

What is the deal
with the whole looking Puma sequence that goes on way too long?

Why are all the
medical students in their 40s and 50s? Seriously these folks look way too old.

Is this a dark
comedy, a teen (mid-life crisis) comedy, a horror film or just a huge mess?

A spaceship lands on earth
and the aliens who look like furry brown elephant things wander around. One of
them is murderous and kills some egg poachers and then starts killing off a
teen pop band that his vacationing in the woods. The other meets a young boy
and befriends him E.T. style.

The aliens are
not scary looking at all, but they are supposed to be cute… kinda.

The three
different sets of characters seem randomly thrown together.

Is this a horror
film, a family friendly adventure, or just a huge mess?

An astronaut returns from
space in his super tiny capsule. But he has been mutated in a lumbering huge
hulk of a monster that kills and kills and kills. Soon scientists and the
military are mobilized to stop him, but he is nearly impossible to catch. And
the movie just kinda stops.

All key plot
points are provided by rambling narration

Scenes seem to
be haphazardly edited together

“… there was no
trail. There was no giant, no monster, no thing called “Douglas” to be
followed.” That’s the end folks, right there!

I don’t like to pick on
child friendly fantasy films, because they are made for kids and just have to
be colorful and entertaining. But this movie… even with Santa Claus, even with
the fact that it is dubbed, even considering it was supposed to be silly and
fun… this movie is just plain strange!

Santa comes
across as insane, bonkers, mad as a hatter and just plain scary.

The antagonist
is a demon from hell. I’m not even kidding.

This movie has
so many strange things in it. To
list them all would take at least three pages.

Some pilots arrive at an air
force base and are trained to pilot the F-104 Starfighter. They refuel in
mid-air… a lot. They play stupid pranks. Mostly we get to see a bunch of flying
and guys jumping into a pool in their “poopie suits”.

Bob Dornan is
the main character and romantic lead.

All the mid air
refueling footage adds up to be about 10 minutes of screen time, an eternity!

Who the hell was
the target audience for this film!?

Runners Up – The Creeping
Terror and The Dead Talk Back

Season Seven: The Incredible
Melting Man

An astronaut is exposed to
solar radiation through the rings of Saturn. His spaceship returns to earth,
but he is an oozy drippy mess. He is also insane and must kill! So he spends
the rest of the movie melting and killing. Dr. Ted Nelson loves crackers in his
soup but is also tasked with finding and stopping the melting man before it is
too late.

How can someone
who is melting get stronger and faster?

There is an
incredibly long scene that follows an old couple in an orchard.

Season Eight:The Incredibly
Strange Creatures who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies

Surprisingly the title only
tells part of the story. A group of friends go to a carnival and have their
fortunes told. Jerry acts like an ass so the fortuneteller hypnotizes him and
he goes on a killing spree. In the meantime there we get to see a lot of
singing and dancing featured in a burlesque show. There is a mutated looking
guy named Ortega. Jerry ends up getting gunned down by cops at the end.

Singing, dancing
and even bad comedians are all featured prominently in the film – for pretty
much no reason.

The dream scene
where Jerry gets caught in some kind of modern dance hell

An Aztec travels to London
to find the savior of the world, Puma Man! It turns out to be a dweeby guy, who
whines a lot and can’t fly without failing his arms like a spaz. Donald Pleasance
wants to take over the world using papier-mâché heads. Puma Man attempts to
stop him but is really just inept. Oh yeah and there are aliens somehow worked
into the plot.

A grandpa tells his grandson
a few strange stories about Merlin when the power goes out in the house. The
stories contain pet murder, horrible mutations, evil spirits, child
endangerment, and an old man asking women if they have seen his monkey. By the
time the movie ends you will question your sanity as well as the sanity of the
storyteller – Ernest Borgnine!

Did the director
really think that cobbling together three different films/storylines was going
to make a cohesive film?

So many strange
things happen in this movie it is competing with Santa Claus.

Who the hell was
the target audience? The movie feels like a Tales From the Darkside episode with whimsical moments inspired by The Princess Bride.

I couldn’t make this one up
if I tried. So an angel and a devil are chatting away about bread salesmen.
They decide to tempt one bread salesman to resume his lazy ways as part of a
bet. But he faces down both of them proving that maintaining grocer goodwill and
plus volume is the only way to succeed in the business of bread delivery and
sales.

What the hell is
going on with a devil and an angel hanging out in heaven together?

4 comments:

Thanks (I think) for these intros to 10 unusual films. I've seen six of them over the years, all in straight-up non-MST3K format. Those six indeed do beg the question "Why was this film made?" "The Incredibly Strange Creatures, etc," for one, did beat "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" to the punch by more than a decade as the first rock and roll musical horror film, but unless you're a fan of amazingly awful movies it's probably a milestone best forgotten. Your descriptions make clear all the films raise the same "Why?" question. For those who believe the stinkiest cheese is still worth a taste however, these appear to be 10 slices of fine Limburger.

For a while there, "Incredibly Strange Creatures..." was the film with the longest title in English (some Indian films have really long titles). I don't think it holds that record any more. It really is a bizarre film, but the MST3K version makes it a lot of fun to watch. And yeah, "why?" Is the first question, my second question is usually, "Who gave this guy money to make this movie?" ;)

I've seen a few of these, but certainly not a majority. I agree, it just seems odd that these could even be made, but that's how it was back then. There have been attempts to bring back the cheese, like Troma films, and stuff like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavara, but there's a missing ingredient, and it may have to do with the intention of the filmmaker or the sophistication of our modern mindset--not that they don't make bad films today, it's just different.

I saw The Incredibly Strange Creatures, before the MST3K parody. It was just too weird, not to enjoy or look away. Santa Claus vs. the Martians, though, is just a bad movie, and could stand a little mocking. Robot Monster I have no idea what they were thinking. Wouldn't it have been great to have been on the set of that one and some of these others just to have overheard the proceedings in the making of it? I saw The Incredible Melting Man too before the heckling, and thought it was a pretty decent, interesting watch from the era. I'll have to refer back to your list when I'm in the mood for something unusual.

I really got a kick out of "Lost Skeleton", even if it was in on the joke, I think the cast did a fine job nailing that Ed Wood feel with the dialogue. The my are a followup called "The Lost Skeleton Returns Again", which was a bit sillier but contained some really good parody material for old jungle movies like "Jungle Goddess" and "Queen of the Amazons".

"Melting Man" has some really impressive makeup effects. But the movie as a whole is really bizarre. Lots of strange script choices and odd characters. MST3K picked right up on those elements and made it one of the funniest episodes of Season Seven. I think I'll have to tackle that one next year.

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About Me

I'm a writer who loves movies, books, video games and music. Wow, that's pretty generic eh? Been a staff writer for DVD Verdict.com and animeondvd.com. I worked at a video store for nearly 10 years. Still working on genre fiction both short and novel length.